There's So Much They Haven't Told You: Short Stories

by Michelle Ross

These 23 stories, a mix of both flash fiction and longer stories, blend science and horror, humor and gravity, hard realism and the otherworldly, myth and the everyday grotesque. A teenage girl bonds with her estranged mother over a mutual love of slasher films; employees are literally and metaphorically trapped in their corporate office as a mysterious creature roams outside the building; and a family battles over the cremated remains of the patriarch at a rattlesnake roundup. No two entries in Ross's collection are alike, and collectively they reveal the potential of the American short story, leaving little unsaid.

Genres: Short Stories, Short Story Collection, Literary Fiction, Fiction

252 pages, Paperback

Published February 15, 2017

About the author

Michelle Ross is the author of the story collections There's So Much They Haven't Told You, winner of the 2016 Moon City Short Fiction Award, and Shapeshifting, winner of the 2020 Stillhouse Press Short Fiction Award (November 2021). Her third story collection They Kept Running won the 2021 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and is forthcoming in Spring 2022. Her fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Electric Literature, Witness, and many other venues. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and the Wigleaf Top 50, among other anthologies. She is fiction editor of Atticus Review. www.michellenross.com

Reviews

[Michelle Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yeah, I wrote it... 5 stars!

[Christopher Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best collections I've read in a long, long time. These are stories you'll want to read again and again--each sentence a gem.

[Michael B Tager · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not too many books make me laugh out loud and cry in the span of it. This is one of them. The short stories range in tone and POV, but they're all good.

[Nick Kocz · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent collection! Here's a complete review I wrote about Ross's wonderful short stories:

http://thecollagist.com/the-collagist...

[Kirby Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the realness of the characters and relationships. At times, it gets a little weird.

[Jan Stinchcomb · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've recently become best friends with the characters in Michelle Ross's collection, There's So Much They Haven't Told You. These stories are smart and imaginative, closely connected to the natural world and unafraid of long and uncomfortable stopovers in the realm of human darkness. But they're funny, too, and strangely satisfying, many of them centering on poor or working class Americans. My favorites: "If My Mother Was the Final Girl" (which I remembered reading in Gulf Coast back in 2003), "Key Concepts in Ecology," "Stories People Tell" and "Virgins."

[Melissa Goodrich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michelle Ross has given me a lot to think about regarding endings. Her stories are strong and lyric and potent - and the endings always feel sharp and jarring. I keep turning the page expecting more paragraphs because they END and they do not announce their ending. I am the bird sailing straight into glass. I am the coyote the moment he steps off the cliff, before he sees the abyss beneath him. I feel like I'm standing on the earth, then realize I'm not. In the absolute best possible way.

[Al Kratz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great collection. Haunting themes: fears, death, sex, adulthood, human connection and disconnection. Science. One of my favorites of it was How Many Ways Can You Die on a Bus which as an heir takes Barthelme’s School to the new levels.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such intelligence and imagination and heart in these stories. I want more!

[Siel Ju · Rating 5 out of 5]

“There is a part of me that knows I probably won’t feel so good about this in the morning, but for now I’m spinning with desire. It’s like I’m all tentacles, a giant squid. Give me, give me, give me.”
*
I like science, but I never thought of atoms as sexy until I picked up Michelle Ross’s debut book. In the first story of this collection, a girl learns the shocking truth that the world is made of atoms, that “when you get right down to it, it’s all just studs and holes.” Later on the school bus a boy whispers seductively into the girl’s hair: “Man, what else don’t you know?”

My full review is at The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/2017/04/you-are-...

[Mills College Library]

Fiction R8254t 2017